Jesse Ezell Blog

Facing pressure from various competitors Quarbon has decided to get into the PowerPoint to Flash conversion market. Fortunately for their competitors, their product sucks. Apparently, they licensed their technology from a company called “Netron“ who doesn't seem to know much of anything about PowerPoint or Flash. Their status page clearly shows that all but one of the “very high“ priority items haven't even been started, but viewing one of Quarbon's sample presentations also quickly reveals that the few things they do support don't even work (and this is in their official product demos... audio doesn't play until you come back to the slide and placement is wrong the first time you view a lot of slides as well). What is even more hillarious is that if you view the product demo they have on their site, created with their viewlet builder, they have one of their main competitor's (Articulate's) product installed on the box. How can you tell this? Well, the “Articulate“ menu option is in plain view inside PowerPoint for the duration of their demo.

June 20th is the target date for the official release for JetBrain's slick VS 2003 refactoring add-in.

Here is the official job post I gave you the heads up on a week or two ago:

I ran into this postential security riskwhile doing a security audit of Empower, our content mangement server that will be available for purchase in just a few short weeks, and it turns out to be a common hole that many tools and apps do not protect you from. Most modern web based blogging tools and a host of web site tools include the ability to view referrer information for a given item. The problem is that these tools assume that the incoming urls are valid, so they simply echo them to the screen. Unfortunately, this means that evil users can insert all sorts of nasty scripts into the referrer string and hijack your browser, stealing all sorts of information like domain specific cookies (ie. login info). If you want to see if you are vulnerable, you should go download the referrer spoofing tool over at http://home.wanadoo.nl/lc.staak/quickspoof.htm (and while you're at it, send Rory a nice google wierdos message :-) ). Enter something like http://hacked.com/<script>alert('you have been hacked');</script> and see if you get a dialog box when you look at your referrer logs.

A company that I have done quite a bit of work for is looking to hire a talented, full-time ASP.NET / C# senior dev. They are looking for a sharp person with a background in building e-commerce, content management, and/or portal solutions. If you are getting tired of doing the same old thing every day and are looking for a challenging position where you can really make a difference and have an impact in the industry, I highly recommend sending your resume and a cover letter over to jobs@articulateglobal.com so that you can see what they have to offer. Articulate is a great, smart company that is quickly moving up the ladder and becoming a dominant force in their industry.I have nothing but positive things to say about the company, so once again, I highly recommend checking this out.

Oh... and by the way, in addition to being a great job with great people, this position is also 99% work from home, which means that other than some meetings which you'll have to fly somewhere like NY to attend, you can do all your work from the comfort of a nice sunny beach :-)

ActiveWin has some great links to videos of the VS 2005 team tools:

So, if we aren't going to get ObjectSpaces merely because some shmackheads at Microsoft think developers can't deal with changes in their object models when Longhorn comes around, they should release a version of ObjectSpaces along with Whidbey the same way they released WSE. This will satisfy the needs of developers who Microsoft promised this stuff in the Whidbey timeframe, as well as allow the community to give feedback on how the current approach works in the real world. At the same time, Microsoft will not be obligated to keep the APIs consistent when Longhorn is released, because the stuff was never advertised as the final deal. Then again, maybe the advertised reason for the delay is wrong. Maybe the reason ObjectSpaces is being delayed is because those shmackheads just couldn't get the thing working after 4 years... if that is the case, we are all in trouble.

“ObjectSpaces will be merged with WinFS!